So you got up the nerve to post a comment on a blog. You carefully craft your comment, check your spelling and just before you click the submit button you notice that you’re asked for your name, e-mail address (not to be published of course,) and your URL. But wait, you don’t have a URL of your own. You don’t blog and you’re not officially representing the library so that URL doesn’t seem right. Well, you can leave the field blank but what if the readers of your comment want to find out more about you. Here’s two great way to get a URL of your very own, without a lot of work.
Option #1: Set up an account with
LinkedIn. LinkedIn give you the ability to create a public profile, list information about your location, education, and work history. From there you make connections with other account holders and list them as colleagues, co-workers, relatives, and friends (in the literal sense, not in the Web 2.0 “friends” sense.) There’s many other things you can do with a LinkedIn account but for now the point is that you get a “public profile” with a URL all it’s own.
Here’s mine. Go ahead and use this page as your link when you post blog comments or any other time you need a URL that represents you. It can be as personal or professional as you’re comfortable with and ends up being a great way to represent yourself online.
Option #2: If you don’t have a blog or other Web site but have accounts in many other systems such as Flickr, YouTube, or Bloglines,
Spock.com can tie this all together onto a single page at a single URL. As you can see on
my Spock profile page I’ve included basic information about myself, photos, and links to all my accounts on all those other services. (Yes, I’ve got a lot and this helps me keep track of them all.) Spock is basically an online identity management service but in this case the result is the same as with LinkedIn. You now have a URL that you can use to represent yourself with online.
So, there are just two options. Pick that one that’s right for you and establish your presence online.
This post was inspired by the post
Your URL When Commenting from Amazon.com
Michael,
Thanks for posting this. On one level I actually suffer from too many URLs, but now I’m considering a LinkedIn profile so that I can have at least one web profile that is solely professionally oriented. So people can look up my employment and education without getting the extra information that I’m addicted to Firefly and Stargate SG-1 and prefer cooking with garlic.